ULTRAMODERNE / Anne Senstad
Good Children Gallery
4017 St Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.goodchildrengallery.com
January 14 - February 5, 2017
Opening Reception Saturday January 14th, 6-9 pm
Ultramodernism, a term which Robert Smithson used in his writings tests the limits (etymologically, “ultra-” is an equivalent for “beyond”) of the autonomy of visual arts regarding meaning.
- Yann Ricordel, The Infinite Referent
The window reminds us that we are captives of the room, by suggesting both flight and confinement... The meaning of the window makes one aware of absolute inertia or the perfect instant, when time oscillates in a circumscribed place. The window prevents movement by setting up a transparent barrier...
— Robert Smithson, Ultramoderne, 1967
The Pink Room Has No Walls
- Anne Senstad, 2007
The exhibition UltraModerne offers a view of
Anne Senstad’s discourse on perception and the phenomenology of light, color
and space. These recent works consist of video installation, textile sculpture, neon sculpture and photography that seek to examine immateriality and the experiential domain of
the senses through processes of re-materialization, geometry and
reinterpretation of form. Circling back to the source, there is a re-conceptualization
, reconsideration and reinvestigation of inhabited space and the realms of essence
and origin. All of the works in the exhibition are interconnected through a
shared source; projections of light and color inhabiting space through time, a
total removal of object and ontological experience of the sources. The title
stems from Robert Smithson’s text on the modernist city as representation of a
non-objective world, pursuing
what lies beyond the observable to find truths in nullification and antimatter.
Senstad’s geometric neon sculpture Soft Geometry #
011, derives from preparatory sketches for her reclaimed modernist sculpture
series Universals, creating an illusion of object, volume and dimension. Soft
Geometry is by way of light and color structuralizing and solidifying the
inhabited corner one observes in projections and light beams. A soft geometric
structure, where light expands providing contradictions of form.
There
is a narration in the amalgamation of colors transpiring time and projected
onto corners and walls in the video installation Color Synesthesia VII, where
pure color fields exist between mind and matter. The video is the seventh in the video series with a
composition by electronic sound pioneer and mathematician C.C.Hennix. In dialogue with the video installation,
photographic works deriving from these very projections represent
materialization of the immaterial non-object, arresting alogon and harnessing
it onto the decisive moment’s celluloid surface of color film. Similarly the very same light and color
immateriality creates the substance of the sculptural walls fabrics,
objectifying and materializing that which cannot be held and re organizing
light and color into folds of the physical, the ephemeral into entity and a
phoneme shaping of time.
The exhibition is organized by Good Children Gallery board members Generic Art Solutions. In the Good Children Gallery Project room Generic Art Solutions will jointly be exhibiting Our Mortal Souls consisting of ice sculpture self portraits and video installation which will be recorded as the ice melts during the length of the exhibition, disintegrating the idea of the self and our ecological future.
With Generous support from The Royal Norwegian Consulate General Houston.